trong clay of that man, as you may pour
intoxication, madness, poison into an empty cup.

"If he wanted war he got it in earnest when our victorious army began to
return from Peru. Systematic operations were planned against this blot
on the honour and prosperity of our hardly won independence. General
Robles commanded, with his well-known ruthless severity. Savage
reprisals were exercised on both sides and no quarter was given in the
field. Having won my promotion in the Peru campaign, I was a captain on
the staff. Gaspar Ruiz found himself hard pressed; at the same time we
heard by means of a fugitive priest who had been carried off from his
village presbytery and galloped eighty miles into the hills to perform
the christening ceremony, that a daughter was born to them. To celebrate
the event, I suppose, Ruiz executed one or two brilliant forays clear
away at the rear of our forces, and defeated the detachments sent out to
cut off his retreat. General Robles nearly had a stroke of apoplexy from
rage. He found another cause of insomnia than the bites of mosquitoes;
but against this one, senores, tumblers of raw brandy had no more effect
than so much water. He took to railing and storming at me about my
strong man. And from our impatience to end this inglorious campaign I am
afraid that all we young officers became reckless and apt to take undue
risks on service.

"Nevertheless, slowly, inch by inch as it were, our columns were closing
upon Gaspar Ruiz, though he had managed to raise all the Araucanian
nation of wild Indians against us. Then a year or more later our
Government became aware through its agents and spies that he had
actually entered into alliance with Carreras, the so-called dictator of
the so-called republic of Mendoza, on the other side of the mountains.
Whether Gaspar Ruiz had a deep political intention, or whether he wished
only to secure a safe retreat for his wife and child while he pursued
remorselessly against us his war of surprises and massacres, I cannot
tell. The alliance, however, was a fact. Defeated in his attempt to
check our advance from the sea, he retreated with his usual swiftness,
and preparing for another hard and hazardous tussle, began by sending
his wife with the little girl across the Pequena range of mountains, on
the frontier of Mendoza."

XI

"Now Carreras, under the guise of politics and liberalism, was a
scoundrel of the deepest dye, and the unhappy state of Mendoza wa